Washington, April 19 : Now heart patients all over the world may not have to undergo a major surgery, for they can be treated with a high-tech robotic caterpillar which will crawl across the surface of their beating heart and deliver treatment. The device, called HeartLander, is being developed by Cameron Riviere and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania.

Resembling a robotic caterpillar, the device can be inserted using a simple invasive keyhole surgery. Once it is placed inside body, it will affix itself to the heart and will slowly find its way across the outside of the organ, injecting drugs or attaching medical devices.

In tests on live pigs, the HeartLander has fitted pacemaker leads and injected dye into the heart. The robot is 20-millimetre-long and has two suckers for feet, each pierced with 20 holes connected to a vacuum line, which hold it onto the outside of the heart.

By moving its two body segments back and forth relative to one another it can inch across the heart at up to 18 centimetres per minute. This back-and-forth movement is produced by pushing and pulling wires that attached to motors outside the patient’s body.

The main aim of the developers is to place in the HeartLander through an incision below the ribcage, and pass it through an additional incision in the membrane that surrounds the heart. Surgeons monitor the device using X-ray video or a magnetic tracker, and control its movements via a joystick.

This new age development is a far better option than the traditional open-heart surgery, in which a huge incision has to be made, and the heart generally has to be stopped for an easy and safe operation. Though minimally invasive procedures on a beating heart are sometimes possible, some areas of the heart are not viable for the instruments inserted through the keyhole incisions, and the narrow space in the chest cavity makes operating complicated.

“HeartLander can reach all parts of the heart’s surface,” Riviere says.

An additional advantage of the robot is that the procedures can be performed without a general anaesthetic, since the device enters the body from a single small incision.

“It avoids having to disturb the ribcage, or to deflate the left lung to access the heart,” Riviere adds.

“This device is certainly like nothing else I’ve seen,” says Andrew Rankin, a cardiologist at the University of Glasgow in the UK. Many procedures can be performed by passing instruments into the heart through blood vessels, but this is not feasible where injured or contaminated tissue is close to the heart’s surface. “This device could be useful in those cases,” Rankin says.

He suggests it would be very useful for future treatments such as stem cell therapies to encourage regeneration of heart tissue. “You can imagine this device moving around the surface of a scarred heart to deliver treatments.”

The researchers are now working on adding a radiofrequency probe to the device, to treat arrhythmias by selectively killing malfunctioning heart tissue. They also plan to add a camera. (ANI)